On his honeymoon, Sam became possessed of an ambition. It was not an extraordinarily fine ambition, but he came to care about, it greatly and it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to desire very keenly something which it is just possible one may get, and Sam’s ambition kept him sane in the days when he knew that Ada had failed him. Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he ought to see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to their local Member for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most thrilling experience of Sam’s honeymoon! It was, for one thing, unique that Ada could not be with him: these were the first hours since he married her that they spent apart and perhaps that, all unconsciously, had gilded them for Sam. They had almost a tiff before she let him go: not quite, but she resented his desertion of her and considered it his fault that she was not allowed to sit with him to hear the legislators who made laws for her as for him. Not that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared to watch the makers at their work, but she managed to put enough snap into her resentment at his going to lend the added quality of a stolen pleasure to his experience. That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is not the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect was amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till now, of veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of the House of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps (to be just) the reality is more impressive than that of any other Chamber on earth. Imagination helping him, it caught and held his mind. A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in a conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but presently the orator warmed to his subject and poured out living words in a spate of real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and this one of those rare speeches, that really convert an opponent: and Sam’s ambition to speak as this politician spoke, and from those benches, came instantly to birth. Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal Member, because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time, Sam had not been a political animal although he had voted, and voted Tory because that was in general the line of Mr. Travers and the property-owning class he represented. Now with a swift enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing of either side, but caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy, snubnosed politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and never lost his way in them.